So, if you haven’t been following along, Python programming now occupies the bulk of my work day. While I really like writing code and like it more using Python, no language is without its quirks. Let me say up front that I don’t consider these quirks bugs or big hulking issues. I’m not trying to…
Author: bkjones
New Job, Car, Baby, and Other News
New Baby! I know this is my geek blog, but geeks have kids too, so first I want to announce the birth of our second daughter, Sadie, who was born on September 15th. She’s now over a month old. This is the first time I’ve stayed up late enough to blog about her. Everyone is…
Sys/DB Admin and Coder Seeks Others To Build Web “A-Team”
UPDATE: There’s no location requirement. I kind of assume that I’m not going to find the best people by geographically limiting my search for potential partners. 🙂 Me: Live in Princeton, NJ area. Over 10 years experience with UNIX/Linux administration, databases and data modeling, and PHP/Perl. About 3 years experience using Python for back-end scripting…
If You Code, You Should Write
The Practice of Programming Programmers are, in essence, problem solvers. They live to solve problems. When they identify a problem that needs solving, they cannot resist the temptation to study it, poke and prod it, and get to know it intimately. They then start considering solutions. At this point, the programmer is not often thinking…
Cool Mac/Mobile Software for Sysadmins, Programmers, and People
I recently upgraded my primary workhorse (a MacBook Pro) to Snow Leopard. Before I did, I decided to go through and take stock of all of the documents and software I’d accumulated. While I was doing this, I simultaneously got into a conversation with a buddy of mine about the software he uses on his…
Representing Relationships in Django Templates Without Writing Extra Code (RelatedManager and ManyRelatedManager)
I’m writing an application that deals with some slightly complex relationships. There are several offices, and each office has several workers. Workers can have multiple projects, and each project can have multiple workers. In addition, each project can serve multiple clients. Here’s what that’d look like in a Django models.py file: While writing the template…
Lessons Learned While Creating a Generic Taxonomy App for Django
So, when I first picked up a guitar, the first song I sat down to learn, by ear, was Stairway to Heaven, not “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. So goes my experience with Django 🙂 The Background I was humming along on my recreation of LinuxLaboratory.org. I got a simple blog in place in just a…
Using a robots.txt File With Django and Apache (on Webfaction)
I’ve developed in a few different environments, including multi-tier ones with middle tier Java app servers and stuff, but it always seemed pretty straightforward to serve something directly from disk. And in the case of PHP, everything is served from disk. There’s no middleware to speak of, so you can throw a robots.txt file in…
Django Settings in Dev and Production: Why the hoops?
So, I’ve taken a break from active development on my project to take a step back and really get a good development workflow together. I’ve been fighting with various components of my development workflow, and in the end decided to compromise: I won’t have something that looks exactly like production, but I’ll have something that…
Django App Design: Extend or Build From Scratch?
Django has proven itself (to me, anyway) as a great tool for the job of creating very robust web applications with lightning speed. In just a week or two, I’ve created a site that encompasses a blog with an akismet-powered comment moderation system, a code sharing section complete with highlighted code segments (and line numbers),…